


The Joys of Fatherhood

by theragingstorm



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Batdad, Bruce showing the first signs of being a dad, Cute Kids, Early in Canon, Fluff, Gen, Humor, Pre-Dick/Barbara, Pre-Relationship, Silly, if you want it to be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-28
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-03-10 19:40:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13508424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theragingstorm/pseuds/theragingstorm
Summary: Young Bruce Wayne has a chance encounter with two small children, while all of them are still ignorant of how important they’ll become to each other.





	The Joys of Fatherhood

**Author's Note:**

> You can consider this an unofficial (and much sillier) sequel to my other fic, Snow And Dirty Rain, if you want to.

It was an uncharacteristically beautiful summer day, and Bruce was spending it under an umbrella.

Under the leafy canopy of Robinson Park’s great oak trees, the walkways scattered with bits of paper and plastic, the young man hunched over a notepad, scribbling away. He’d dressed rather casually, or so he thought, in a black Armani turtleneck and matching slacks, the black umbrella blocking what little sunlight managed to get through the leaves.

Around him, joggers darted past, giving him strange looks along the way, while dogs and children gamboled around indiscriminately. He didn’t mind, only hoping that nobody would get any ideas about bothering him. He had finally come up with veritable ideas for his transportation vehicles and needed to get the logistics right —

“Bruce? Bruce Wayne, is that you?”

So much for that.

Sighing, Bruce tucked the notepad away, readying his best withering look and monosyllabic answers —

Again, his plan was ruined, this time when he realized he who was talking to him.

He had only seen Captain James Gordon sporadically since he was twelve, only while Gordon was on the job, and never longer than a couple hours at a time. In other words, the man was one of his closest friends.

“Back from your ‘extended vacation,’ I see.” Gordon adjusted his glasses. Though he was only in his thirties, he was already graying at the temples.

“Jim.” Bruce got to his feet, still holding the umbrella. “I...I’ve been back for a year.”

“Could’ve fooled me.” His mustache twitched slightly. But the humor quickly evaporated; Gordon sighing deeply.

“What’s wrong?”

“...Remember a few years ago, when you came to my station with the proof that the GCPD was missing for the Snyder murders?”

“Yes, you were very embarrassed. Why?”

He might have been imagining it, but Gordon looked...awkward.

“Well, do you also remember how I told you about my brother in Chicago, and my...my niece?”

Niece?

Bruce furrowed his brow.

Yes, there _had_ been a picture of another child on Gordon’s desk. Red-headed, like her uncle, with a face full of freckles, and — he remembered very clearly; it had struck him as odd for a little girl — a clever grin that Jim had affectionately described as “devilish.”

“Yes. Why?”

“Well, my brother’s visiting for the week, and although James Jr. didn’t want to go to the park, Barbara did, so I offered to take her, and —”

“Jim, don’t tell me you lost her.”

“I didn’t lose her, I just don’t know where she is. But for god’s sake Bruce, she could be anywhere, getting up to anything, with anyone. She could be in pain, or kidnapped! Look, I’ll never forgive myself if something happened to her.”

 

* * *

 

She was covered in dust, but otherwise mostly looked like a normal girl in her overalls, star-patterned t-shirt, and red ponytail. Albeit an _older_ girl. Kinda pretty too — if you didn’t think about how interacting with girls was fraught with the risk of cooties.

She squinted up at him, green eyes narrowing. Her freckles were nice, he thought. Like skin stars.

“Hey, kid. How’d you get all the way up in that tree?”

Dick swung his legs over the side, kicking at mid-air. Dya had told him to never talk to strangers, and he would already be in trouble for running away from his parents again, but he figured that he could still make an exception for other kids.

“I’m good at climbing stuff. And it’s fun being up so high.” He hooked his legs over the branch, dangling upside down like a bat. “I mean, look! I gotta be a hundred feet up!”

“You’re _ten_ feet up, at the most.” The girl put her hands on her hips.

Dick pouted. Dangling upside down, he was pretty close to her, which meant he was also pretty close to her scowl.

“You’re no fun.”

“Being right _is_ fun.” Her scowl became a smirk.

Dick stuck his tongue out at her, and kept it out for a long time.

Neither said a word for that time.

“So, you wanna play?”

“Sure.”

 

* * *

 

“Jim, I don’t think I’m qualified to corral your niece. I mean, I really don’t know anything about children.”

“Bruce, she’s eight, and she already knows what ‘facetious,’ ‘incandescent,’ and ‘salubrious’ mean, and how to use them in a sentence. _Nobody’s_ qualified to corral her.”

He couldn’t really argue with that.

“Right,” he sighed, folding his umbrella down, “I’ll search the north end of the park, you search the south end. She can’t have gone far; it’s only so big, and someone’s bound to have seen her, at the very least.”

_Some detective I’ll be if I can’t even find an eight-year-old girl._

 

* * *

 

Her name was Barbara. And she did not take Dick’s Godzilla impression very well.

“I didn’t say you could knock down my stick buildings!”

“Downtown Tokyo was in need of some smashing,” he explained, brushing bits of twig off his knees.

“Plenty of stuff gets smashed up around here as it is,” she complained, picking up what was left of her architecture. “I don’t need a dumb boy messing with my stuff.”

“Who’s a dumb boy!?”

“You!”

“Yeah, well, you’re a smelly girl.”

“Ooh, nice comeback!”

He kicked dust at her. She threw sand at him.

Dick decided that he liked her.

“Look, I’m still gonna be Godzilla. But maybe, y’know, you could be Mothra instead’a whoever builds Tokyo.”

“Building contractor.”

“Yeah, that.”

“Cool.” Barbara grinned, finally mollified. “So I get to wrestle you?”

“Yeah, that way I get to be Godzilla, and you get to throw more sand at me.”

“That sounds like a mutually beneficial situation.” She regarded him as he tried to figure out what that meant. “You’re really not that dumb, Dick.”

“Gee, thanks.”

 

* * *

 

Bruce was halfway across the park when he saw the other man.

He was a few years younger than Jim, about thirty-one, with thick black hair, almond-shaped brown eyes, a long nose, and a thin mustache. He was quite handsome; Indian, Pakistani maybe? Bruce guessed.

He was also screaming obscenities.

“ _Dick!_ ” the man bellowed, scaring a flock of pigeons and scandalizing a middle-aged mother in a tracksuit. “Dick! Dick, for god’s sake —”

He was running down the path, periodically veering off to look in the woods. Bruce was more than a little bit scared to wonder what he was looking for.

The thought had only just occurred to him when the obscenity-screaming man ran right over.

“Excuse me —” He was breathless; panting slightly, “— have you seen a little boy? Five years old, about this tall, black hair, blue eyes, wearing denim overalls and a yellow t-shirt?”

Bruce was so taken aback that he gave a completely candid answer.

“No, I’m looking for a different child. A girl.”

The man looked about as confused as he felt.

“You’re a little young to already be a father.”

That’s _what’s surprising about this conversation?_

“She’s not mine. She’s my friend’s.”

“Ah.” He exhaled sharply, looking around the vicinity again. “Well, if you happen to see a little boy like that, tell him that his dad’s looking for him. John Grayson. That’s my name.” The next part, as he jogged away, was under his breath, “And then I’m going to tell him that he is so grounded. No playing with the elephants, no dress-up with the clowns, no guitar lessons from Lady Beardsley, and no dessert, for a week.”

Bruce stood there for a good ten seconds with his mouth open before he remembered what he was supposed to be doing.

 

* * *

 

Dick lay down in the grass with dust covering nearly every surface of his body, Barbara beside him with mud on her nose and her hair like an exploded pile of ragweed, and he grinned with genuine happiness.

“You make a good Mothra,” he told her.

“That’s ‘cause wrestling is fun too,” she replied, smiling right back. “I like it here. I hate Chicago. The neighbor kids don’t wanna play with me and school’s too easy and Mom says young ladies shouldn’t show off, especially not how smart they are.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Right?”

“I like it here too!” He blew a tuft of grass off his nose. “I’ve been to lotsa places, but Gotham’s where everyone goes...Dya and Dat say, everyone goes all out. I like that. I like all the lights and the weird buildings and all the crazy stuff everyone does while we’re here.”

“Gotham is pretty crazy.”

“Right?” he echoed. Then: “Hey Barbara, if you don’t like Chicago, you could come with me! I think you’d like the circus a whole lot.”

“I can’t run away to the circus!”

“Why not? It’s fun. And there aren’t a lotta other kids there; I need a best friend. I think you’re pretty neat, so you could be my best friend.”

She blushed. Dick was taken aback, he’d never made a girl blush before.

“It’s not that I don’t agree. I’d like to, but your parents and their friends would be arrested for kidnapping, since I’m not their kid.”

“Awwww.”

Barbara tilted her head back, gazing at the strips of blue through patterns of green.

“Though I do wish I could see you again. You’re going away with the circus in two days, and I gotta go back to Chicago on Saturday. If we both lived here, we would be best friends.”

“We’ll see each other again,” he said confidently.

“You really think so?”

“Yep. I really do.”

“There’s no proof of that.”

“My knowing it is proof.”

“Dummy-head.”

“Nerd.”

 

* * *

 

Bruce had been searching for the girl for nearly an hour, plenty of time to think of all sorts of horrible things that could have happened to her in the meantime. He had already begun planning what he would do if he found her injured, if she had been abducted, if she was stuck in a ditch or up a tree crying for help —

So it took him more than a little bit by surprise when he stumbled across a pair of excited children playing tag in a clearing instead. Both wearing t-shirts and overalls, their hair like birds’ nests, their faces covered in dirt, knees in grass stains.

Bruce was struck with an odd bolt of warmth; he had never gotten to play like that either before or after his parents’ deaths. Besides, they were...awfully cute, so much happier than he.

“I got you!” the girl yelled, tackling her playmate around the waist and pulling him to the ground.

“No fair!” the boy squealed between giggles, face down in the dirt, trying to throw her off. “That’s not how you tag people!”

“The rules of tag are nonexistent. So I can tag you however I want!”

Okay, so that was definitely the girl in question. And that boy...

“You’re a cheater, Barbara!”

“Only losers say that!”

That boy was definitely the one who’d been missing too.

“You two are in so much trouble.”

The kids froze. Dick glanced up from the dust, Barbara glanced up from Dick’s back, both staring at him defiantly. She tossed her head back, proud as a wild animal.

“I don’t talk to strange grown-ups,” she informed him. “I tell strange grown-ups that my uncle works for the police.”

Bruce couldn’t help but be impressed by the kids’ brass. Grudgingly so though, especially in her case, because he was the unlucky bastard who had to take her back.

“It’s your uncle Jim who sent me, Barbara. He’s been searching for you for hours.”

“Oh, well, that’s his fault. Just walking around the park is boring. Playing with Dick is much more fun.”

Bruce felt his heart seize up.

“I’m sorry, _what?_ ”

“That’s me,” the boy spoke up cheerfully. “My name’s Richard, but everyone calls me Dick.”

“Oh.” A whole lot of things made sense to him right then, including everything about John Grayson. “Well, anyway, Barbara, Dick, you need to go back to your families now.”

He didn’t expect them to agree. They didn’t disappoint.

“Get ‘im!”

Both kids bum-rushed his legs, latching on like koalas, knocking him flat on his backside, staining his expensive slacks with dust.

_Some crime-fighter I’ll be if I get taken down by a couple of small children._

So immediately, he snatched them off his legs by their suspenders. Getting to his feet again, he held them up at eye-level like naughty puppies, watching Dick pout and Barbara glower.

“Don’t blame _me_. You two are the ones who ran off to play with a stranger.”

“ _You’re_ the stranger,” Dick argued. “Barbara’s my best friend.”

“...You just met her.”

“Yeah, but we already know everything about each other. We’re pretty different in some ways. I’m a boy, she’s a girl; I’m brown, she’s white; I’m from the circus, she’s from Chicago; my favorite color’s blue, hers is green; she likes to sit and make things, I don’t.”

He paused, then said wisely:

“But we’re the same in all the ways that matter. We both like to run around when we play, we both like it here and each other, and we both think that being able to fly would be pretty neat.”

Bruce blinked a few times. Barbara rolled her eyes.

“He _never_ shuts up,” she confided.

“Oh yeah. That’s another thing we don’t have in common. She’s bossy and I’m not.”

Barbara stuck her tongue out at him, and he instantly returned the favor. Bruce hauled them apart.

“Dick, if I ever have a son, I am keeping him far away from girls so I can avoid any situations like yours with Barbara.”

“Don’t be a chauvinist,” the little girl in question scolded. “You could have a daughter, which is just as important.”

“Yeah, an’ more importantly,” Dick chimed in, “you can’t tell kids what to do. We’re gonna have tons of situations. ‘Specially me and Barbara are gonna, if we can.”

Bruce, standing in a clearing on a beautiful summer’s day, his expensive pants covered in dust, holding a pair of grubby children by their suspenders, sighed very deeply.

“Scratch that, then. I am never, ever having any kids.”

With that in mind, he walked away again to find their guardians. The pair of them kept chattering, something about what they would do if they ever met when they were older. God forbid.

Sunlight dappled through the summer leaves and fell upon the trio, mingling, in Bruce’s mind, with the happy giggles of the children beside him.


End file.
